Tuesday, October 7, 2008

City Hall Proposal, Revive285, RFP vendors & Meeting Update

The Dunwoody Crier has a nice article on the front page outlining a proposal to put a future City Hall in Dunwoody Village. Since I received Mr. Twiner's proposal in an e-mail, I figured I would share his preliminary concept drawing of a walkable & bikable Dunwoody Village.

If you have already read the Crier, you will see that I also attended a Revive285 meeting last week in Chamblee to find out the status of what GDOT was planning to do to the Perimeter. The only definitive thing I came away from that meeting with, was fully realized just today when I saw my photo in the paper; I either need to lose some weight or stop wearing horizontal stripes!

At this point I can tell you that there are no hard and fast plans on how to improve the Perimeter's traffic flow but I was there to stress to the engineers that I-285 is a local, east - west traffic route here in Dunwoody between North Peachtree, Ashford Dunwoody & Peachtree Dunwoody roads and that they shouldn't screw it up by limiting our access or charging tolls.

A citizen asked the city for the list of companies who were contacted by the Citizens for Dunwoody to make a proposal regarding the RFP, or who requested a copy of the RFP. Since the list was just provided to me today and this citizen actually wanted this information published on my site; I am happy to comply with his request. They are,... Severn Trent, OpTech, PBS&J, CH2MHill, Parsons, URS, Arcadis, Pond, SungardHTE, Advanced Federal Systems, Camp Dresser & McKee, ADP, EMC, New Venture Group, T&S Services, Riley Attorneys. Additional firms may have also downloaded the RFP from the Citizens for Dunwoody website.

The CFD also sought the assistance of the following organizations to obtain as broad a representation as possible of vendors; the International Association of City Managers, Carl Vinson Institute (UGA), National Council of Public Private Partnerships, Georgia Municipal Association, and the Reason Foundation.

Tonight's City Council meeting was rather dry with us passing some needed administrative ordinances. Senator Dan Weber spoke during the open comment period for the need to start taking some action and he discussed his involvement with a group of knowledgeable residents and experienced neighboring city officials in the development of the Hybrid model. Another commenter stated that he trusted the city council and that we should start moving forward and finally another citizen (who is also an employee of CH2MHill) asked that we rebid the proposal again.

FYI, I can report that the Mayor and City Council are very busy behind the scenes meeting with DeKalb County to negotiate the various inter-governmental agreements (IGA's), meeting with Federal Representatives to explore grant opportunities, interviewing prospective City Managers, coordinating the development of a city website, interviewing bank managers to narrow down a financial institution and other very worthwhile activities.

It appears that next week, the Mayor and City Council will again be exploring which delivery model for services the city will be using. Our next meeting is a work meeting (no votes but there may be some lively discussion) tentatively scheduled for Sunday (time & location yet unknown) and then a voting meeting on Tuesday night the 14th, probably again at Peachtree Middle School.

Heneghan Philosophy on Public Service

As a long time resident of the Dunwoody North community who created this blog to fulfill two ideals. First is that when I have the ability to make a difference, I have a responsibility to do so and second, transparency in Government breeds self-corrective behavior.

After the creation of the City of Dunwoody which I worked to establish, I stepped down from being the President of the Dunwoody North Civic Association to run for a seat on the new City Council. Since my election in 2008, I have prided myself of posting every public document and agenda item to this blog for all to see.